


The Seventh Sense

by Neftzer_nettlestonenell



Series: Fare Thee Well [4]
Category: Highlander: The Raven
Genre: Depression, Gen, Grief, Loss, amanda ruined my life, and also i hate her and everything to do with her, bereavement, duncan's island hideout, freaking out b/c you've discovered you're immortal, my name is nick wolfe, the watchers - highlander
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-09-28
Updated: 1999-09-28
Packaged: 2018-12-16 21:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11837715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neftzer_nettlestonenell/pseuds/Neftzer_nettlestonenell
Summary: in which it is revealed that this too shall endas all stories in which love is denied;with tears and a journey





	The Seventh Sense

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Daire, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [HL Raven's Nest](http://fanlore.org/wiki/HL_Raven%27s_Nest). Deciding to give the stories a more long-term home, I began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [HL Raven's Nest's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/hlravensnest/profile).

The Seventh Sense by: Ailis

  
**The Seventh Sense**  
_in which it is revealed that this too shall end  
as all stories in which love is denied;  
with tears and a journey_

by: Ailis

Prologue: _Nobody Comes to Nick's_

Sprawled across the Murphy bed at the cheap Parisian rooming house where he was living, Nick Wolfe was dreaming of being very drunk. Not such a great leap from the room's surroundings. The TV--on constantly though he never watched--showed a close-up of Humphrey Bogart drinking himself into oblivion. Bogey's haggard face loomed large on the black and white screen, whose light cast both glow and shadow over the room's tattered furniture, drawn drapes, and abandoned bottles and cans; even over the heavy, soon-to-be-full beard growing on Nick's chin. 

Getting nicely, numbly drunk had become more difficult for Nick since he had come around from being mortally shot by Amanda, almost a month past. 

Which was a shame, because he had never needed the numbness more than now, when every cell in his newborn body had become hyper-sensitive to any and every stimulus; from the tingling rub of cloth against his skin, to the now-unfamiliar, almost assaulting touch of air and light. 

But the dream he was having, the dream was nice. He was at Sanctuary, in the vague way dreams work, sometime in the future. Nick saw Pascal and Myers, both aged. Looking into the reflective surface of the bar, he saw grey at his own temples, and deeper lines around his eyes and mouth. Even in the dream, Nick gave a sigh of relief. It wasn't true. It had never been true. Mortality was, as it had always been, his. 

No longer at the bar, he was descending the stairwell into the club only to see...Amanda walking in on the arm of a faceless man dressed in chain mail and carrying a sword. When she smiled at him, he felt her urging him on to draw a sword of his own and fight her armored escort. 

_Of all the gin-joints of all the towns in all the world,_ Nick thought bitterly, _and she walks into mine._ He would not fight. 

Back at the bar, drink firmly in his grip, he was consumed with getting high again when Amanda appeared and sat next to him, just as she always had, her hand gliding back and forth over the bar, painting patterns in it. He knew she was coming to ask him to fight the other man, to tell him it was what she expected of him. That there could be only one. 

"We'll always have Paris, Darling," she said, and to avoid looking at her Nick turned his face back down to the bar. His reflection had changed. It was young again. The lines no longer even a shade deeper than they had been the day he died. He felt himself explode inside. 

"We'll always have Paris," he yelled. "Congratulate yourself, Amanda. We'll have Paris. Forever and ever and ever and ever!" 

He tried to scream some more through his drunken haze, and louder, but he had lost all control. He felt the dreamscape tilt slightly. When things coalesced, Amanda's body was lying on the floor in front of him as though the very force of his words had knocked her down. He could not bear to look, nor could he bring himself to go to her and apologize. 

When he turned back to the bar, back to his drink, her head was there, separated from her body, sitting among some lettuce on a serving platter. The mouth opened and it began to speak. 

Nick woke, his heart pounding like a horse's hooves galloping against hard-packed earth. He could not tell if he was in a sweat from the dream. He had not showered in days, and not gone out in a week. The sheets on his bed were tangled from use and other nightmares they had endured. 

The first thing that met his frightened eyes was a near-empty bottle of Absolut precariously turned on its side on the nightstand, next to the shrilly ringing phone. _The phone_. That was what had brought him back. 

Gingerly he picked it up without answering and waited for the other person to identify themselves. It was a trick he had learned from Myers, a trick to use when you didn't want to be found. 

"Nick Wolfe? C'est Pascal." 

Relief. _Not Amanda then, she hadn't found him yet. Maybe didn't want to find him. Maybe wasn't even looking. Well, good_. He saw her head again from the dream, grotesquely disembodied, unnatural, but without having lost any of its carnal appeal for him. And for that, he thought quite possibly he hated her. 

Pascal continued, unaware of Nick's internal monologue. "I've got a message for you. From Duncan MacLeod, about a job in America." 

Nick listened to the rest of what Pascal had to say, as well as the liberal commentary the bartender offered as to his personal opinions on the message and its sender, then returned the phone to its cradle. 

He didn't have to find the pier glass on the wall to know that he looked like a dying man, or pretty close. _Death_. He couldn't think about MacLeod now. _Couldn't think at all_. Grabbing a pillow tightly to his chest, he gripped it until the hold affected his breathing, then turned, burrowing back into the sheets, and fitfully slept. 

His boyhood room in Chicago. Nick's nose told him that his parents were downstairs by the buttery smell of the popcorn they would make after the kids had been sent to bed. They would snuggle down next to each other on the couch for the evening, the popcorn hanging in the air like pollen in a greenhouse. 

He moved stealthily across his brothers' room, doing his best impersonation of G.I. Joe, and tugged at the sheet on Sandy's bed, careful not to wake Mike in the upper bunk. 

"Sandy!" Nick whispered as he tugged at the sheets, waiting to hear the familiar, but grudging, invitation from his older brother; "Aw, c'mon then, Nicky." 

Standing on tiptoe to see if his brother was asleep yet, Nick swayed. Harder when he saw Sandy's face. _Death_. Cold as putty and his body hollow, as though there had never been anything inside. _This was not how it had been. This was not real._ Nick screamed. 

The sound of his own haggard breathing finally convinced him he was awake. He opened his eyes to the room in Paris and the bottle of Absolut. His fist shot out before his conscious mind even made the connection. The burn of the liquid down his throat did not ease his chest's rattle, but the shock of it did give him the impetus to move. 

Getting out of the bed, Nick took several turns around the room to orient himself to being on his feet before deciding. 

He had to get rid of this fear--something he had little enough experience with--and these constant and recurring nightmares. He considered the offer Pascal had relayed. 

_Was it possible to make it out of the city without being forcibly initiated by some immortal on the prowl?_ He didn't even have a sword. Didn't want one. 

Nick wondered if he was going to be able to fly. He was still a little soused. He looked around the room, the cans and bottles all emptied from his own thirst for forgetfulness decorating the squalor in which he had been living. _Living, hardly. Hiding was the truth._

He picked the receiver up and began to direct dial the many digits of the international number he had, from force of habit, written down. He had scratched them, with a bitten pencil he had found, into the soft light wood bottom of the nightstand's drawer. 

Nick Wolfe's hands were shaking, but no longer from the vodka. 

* * *

**Part One**  
Day One: _Little House in the Big Woods_

**"I died. Then I felt my own soul or something coming right out of my body, like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn't dead anymore."--Ernest Hemingway**

"Give me your bags," said the man who had introduced himself to Nick as Grissom Tall Sky. 

"You can call me Gris," he had soon appended at the small Canadian airport where Nick had flown from Paris. Two Mounties, three airline personnel and a janitor the only others waiting in the terminal to greet the arriving flight. And the Mounties were only there, by all appearances, to facilitate a prisoner transfer. 

Gris had just landed a helicopter somewhere in the wilderness near--well, Nick didn't know where. He also didn't know how to fly a helicopter, so meekly he handed over his bags. 

Tall Sky went through them methodically, sorting out certain items, including Nick's flask, laptop, and what was left of a bottle of Jim Beam that had carried him through the flight. 

"There is a computer at the cabin," the other man said, "and you will be sent whatever liquor you choose at the beginning of every other week. A bottle of hard liquor or a six-pack, whatever you prefer. You can hoard it if you want to get tanked up all at once." 

Nick Wolfe was nervous. He was entirely out of his element and had no idea what he was getting into. The whole thing had taken on the feel of one of the covert-type operations Myers was always pulling off. 

It hadn't helped his nerves that on the cross-Atlantic flight, Nick had remembered that nagging little piece of information about how Duncan MacLeod had beheaded his own student Richie Ryan two years ago. Even though she--he balked at the thought of Amanda--had vouched for MacLeod, Nick no longer felt like the decision he had made two days ago was the right one. He thought now that it just might get him killed. 

Still, he had felt somewhat comforted--if you could call it that--by the taciturn Gris, whose presence at the airport gate was about the only thing that kept Nick from bolting. Back to...on to...somewhere. 

Grissom Tall Sky was a six-foot-four Blackfoot Indian, with his sleek still-black hair in two braids on either side of his face. He was about fifty years old, and though Nick couldn't see it, there was a spot on his wrist where a circular tattoo had been very painfully removed more than two decades ago. He never stepped outside without a worn cowboy hat of a dusty brown color on his head. And never appeared indoors with it on; a nod to a long-ago grace that few men observed anymore. 

* * *

Out of the copter Gris pulled a brown paper package and handed it to Nick, looking significantly at the way the other man was dressed, taking in the fancy, not-for-real-work cowboy boots and impractical uptown leather jacket, both acquired originally more for form than function. 

"You might as well put these on now," Gris instructed, "we've got a ways to walk before we get there." 

The package had included Gortex hiking boots as well as a North Face coat and serious outdoorsman's backpack in which Nick was told to put the things not discarded by Gris from his duffel bag and carry-on. That which he removed, both his excess inappropriate clothing and other non-essentials, was placed back into the helicopter's cabin--for safekeeping, Nick hoped. 

On their journey through the forest, Gris turned every now and then to share something about how he could expect to live for the foreseeable future. 

Groceries would be dropped off every week to week and a half, at which time laundry would be picked up. If he needed any particular personal care items, he could leave a note in a tree that Gris would point out. His bills would be paid electronically where possible, from the salary he was to receive as the acting caretaker. He was to have a post office box somewhere in East Texas, which was where Gris and Cather came from, and his mail would be brought to him with the groceries. Outgoing mail would be taken back and sent out from Texas, to divert the curious from his true location. 

Once they reached the island by canoe ride, Nick's nervousness returned. He was not at his best in the woods. Being a city boy, he had never spent much time in the great outdoors. Angry bears and the film _Deliverance_ all came to mind. And even though he didn't really want the company, he was relieved when Gris announced that it was late, so he would stay the night, and leave in the morning. 

"But before I go," the older man said, "I'm going to need a list of friends and family you've spoken to or seen in the past four months that might feel like looking for you. Names and addresses. For those to whom you were most close, you'll write a letter, saying you need some time away." 

It occurred to Nick that the number of people he kept in contact with was fast dwindling. Lauren, Claudia, Bob Marshall, all gone. There would be no need to compose letters to them. He wished there was. That he would have the relief of struggling over how to justify to Claudia that he had left the force, moved on an over-developed whim of revenge to Paris. Or that he was forced to detail his recent actions to Lauren; his anger, his journey out of fear and desperation to a place where no one could find him, and a place where he knew no one, but found it necessary to trust all. 

If he were compelled to write explanations to others then perhaps, perhaps, he might be able to begin understanding the course of action he had taken in the past year himself. And if he could understand it, maybe he could wake up from the nightmare that had become his life. 

Nick wondered what he'd write to his parents, his brother. If he could pull off a letter as though nothing earth-shattering had happened--he'd just decided to move to the mountains and live off the land among the songbirds and the pastoral scenery, and what deep down inside he was sure were some very dangerous wild animals that would come out at night. 

Gris' voice prompted him back to the present and the necessity of tying up his past life's loose ends now. 

"Better start with Amanda," he suggested. At saying her name, Gris' face took on his first expression of the day. Nick would have had to classify it as a scowl. 

* * *

Day Two 

The letter to Amanda had been surprisingly easy to write. 

_I am safe. Do not try to find me._ Signing his name to it had been the impossible part. He did not care if Amanda thought he was safe, but then, the older man had a point about not wanting people to try to find him, here or anywhere else. Still, he had not signed the note, nor written her name at the top. He did not expect she would have much difficulty figuring out who it was from. 

Gris had shown him how to work the two-way radio in case he should get in to trouble. 

"If you want to leave, use this frequency. A ranger there is paid to listen for emergencies. The copter will come the next day, and you're free to go." 

It seemed straightforward enough, although if he left, he did not know where he would go, free or not. Gris went on though, in a cautionary tone--if his voice could be said to ever alter in its delivery. "Don't try to leave without a guide, Wolfe. The woods are thick and confusing here, even for the best scouts." 

Before Gris left, he took some things out of his own pack to leave behind with Nick. 

"These are pictures of the only others living besides Duncan MacLeod and myself who know about the island. MacLeod will not come by while you are here, so what he looks like is immaterial. This," Gris slid a picture across the table to Nick, "is Connor MacLeod. We have tried to get word to him about your being here, but he is proving difficult to locate." 

Nick turned only slightly, giving the black and white photo a quick glance. 

Gris continued. "If you see him, be very wary, and explain yourself as fully as possible. You may mention me, if you think it might help." Another picture slid across the table, this time in color. "This is Cather." It was all the explanation he gave. 

"Leaving would be a mistake, but if you choose to, you should not leave without this." Grissom pulled out a sword and laid it across the table, sensing correctly that Nick would refuse to take it from him. 

"A Viking sword," Nick was told. "Made around 800. The guard is very small." The Indian handled it as he might a branding iron. Like something that fit his hand well and familiarly. "There is also a scabbard." Gris leaned that in the corner, across the room from the table and the sword. If Nick wanted to put the sword away, he was going to have to come into contact with it himself. 

* * *

Day Three 

Grissom Tall Sky had left. It occurred to Nick that he had not thanked the other man, not really said much to him except in response to what he was explicitly asked. Yet the sight of his retreating back in the canoe--the only way off the island that didn't involve a lengthy swim--left Nick feeling chilled, lonely and a little afraid. He allowed himself to wonder how much these people--how much Gris-- knew about what he had been, and what he had become. He was willing to bet odds were that they knew more than he would have liked. 

He struggled to shake off the feeling. 

The Viking sword lay on the table with the two pictures, untouched, and Nick willed a heavy layer of dust to cover them both. 

He ate a makeshift dinner of grits and honey out on the front steps of the cabin, his knees forming his only table. 

That night, his first night on the island alone, was very long, and filled with more noises than he could place. 

* * *

Day Four 

Nick slept oddly now, settling in before twilight, and rising with the pre-dawn. He found in doing that, nodding off before the dark came and the forest sounds began to creep into the little cabin, he could sleep better. Undisturbed _. Mostly undisturbed_. There were the dreams. The nightmares still came, and nothing about him felt peaceful. 

He began to think that he should try to take up fishing to vary his diet. During the passing days, he tried to teach himself how to cast, using as his guide some ancient memory of a sporting show he and Mike used to watch on Saturdays growing up. It was poor amusement. 

* * *

Day Seven 

Most of the day was spent composing a long letter on the laptop to Bert Myers, trying to explain his disappearance in words that Bert would both understand and believe. It took all of his concentration. His gut told him that if he created an excuse mostly from the truth--that he had had a falling out with Amanda--that Bert would buy it. But he could not bring himself to type the words, to make what happened permanent in some way, to corroborate what had happened in that Parisian warehouse by displaying their names together on a screen, or a page. 

He went outside and sat the laptop on the stump used for chopping wood, still avoiding the table with the Viking sword. 

* * *

Day Nine 

Realizing how undecorated the cabin's interior was, Nick finally took the pictures Gris had left behind from off the table, willfully unmindful of the Viking sword. 

Each picture was an 8x10. The one of the man-- _Connor_ , Nick said to himself--was black and white, a posed headshot, the kind you might get taken upon arrest. A broad forehead, low brow, and the sort of mouth that would be good for registering distaste looked out of the photo at him. If it were possible that taking a photograph of someone could steal their soul, it was not the case in this picture. Either that was not possible, or this man had no soul left to capture. 

The opposite was true for the photo of Cather. It was in color, and from the way its subject was smiling at the camera, it had been taken by a friend or family member. A close-up of a young woman and her horse; the horse, yellow-tan in color, the woman's skin tone a rich summer clay. 

_She looks like Gris_ , Nick thought, quickly realizing the resemblance was only a trick of his mind. Both were Native American, sharing the same straight black hair and wide-boned cheeks. Yet he could not get a handle on the color of her eyes, whether they were blue or green; they were darker than you would expect from those colors. Midnight blue, he finally decided, if the eyes of an Indian could be such a color, like a new pair of Wrangler jeans or the trim on his '84 Silverado. 

Her smile, as she lay along the neck of the horse, her long hair hanging free and intertwined with its blonde mane, was so deep, so full, that it drew attention away from everything else in the picture. It made you want to be the horse, or the person taking the picture--whoever it was that elicited such affection from its subject. 

Turning the photo over, Nick saw a name on the back, _Jackson_ , and a date, _1993_. Letting the picture fall from his hands onto the table, he noticed that just above Cather's right eyebrow there was a scar running from the middle of her forehead straight back into her hairline. She had made no attempt at covering it up or concealing it, her forehead free of bangs. 

Nick tried to imagine her now, six years later, six years older. He wondered whether she had changed very much physically, whether she had cut her hair, grown self-conscious of the scar, and whether she was still able to look uncompromisingly into the lens of a camera with such happiness, knowing the security that came from believing her soul was her possession alone. 

Using some nails and a hammer he had found in the small shed out back, he posted each 8x10 to its own wall. His hand slipped on the second one, though--the photo of Connor--and his sloppy aim landed the nail right in the temple of the man occupying the black and white headshot. Somehow the photo's altered look appealed to Nick. He began to salute it on occasion as he passed. 

* * *

Day Eleven 

Caught his first fish, using the neglected rod he had found in a corner, and worms washed above ground from the previous night's rain. He felt the small stirrings of pride that usually required a camera and inflated-chest pose. 

Cleaning the fish, his hand slipped and he cut himself deeply with the survival knife he had bought for the trip. After the gash healed before his disbelieving eyes, he went off and drank the last of his six pack, swearing at it for not being enough. 

The fish, which he clumsily burned over the fire, was inedible and full of small bones. He ate it anyway, washing it down with bitterness and spite. 

* * *

Day Thirteen 

It came to Nick early one morning while he was out back of the cabin chopping some wood on his computer desk. A sensation that hit him deep in his gut and doubled him over like the dry heaves. His line of sight vibrated like he was strapped to the nearby generator. The Buzz. He hadn't felt it since coming back from being shot, Amanda's face swimming above him. 

_Amanda_. His mind stuttered. _Probably not Amanda, but someone. Someone._

Throwing the axe into the block, and not knowing how much time he had, he raced inside and grabbed for his gun. At least Gris hadn't banned that from the cabin. There was a rifle above the door as well if he thought he needed it. 

Nick kneeled at one of the north-facing windows and was able to see a canoe pull onto the island. It was the same indigo-colored canoe that Gris had left in, but it wasn't Gris carrying several boxes to the tree where Nick had placed his letter to Myers. 

A woman, small of frame, wearing Oakleys and an Indian-blanket coat, her hair out of sight under a hat, bent slowly and methodically unloading the canoe. 

She did not seem at all interested in anything but setting boxes by the tree. Still, Nick assiduously held his cover. And when she turned her back to him he saw that what he had assumed was a backpack was actually a child carrier, holding a baby wearing a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. 

Nick's gaze never wandered from the twosome, who removed his letter from the tree and replaced it with something else. 

The feeling in his stomach settled finally and receded as they left, but to be certain they were not watching him he waited until the next afternoon to walk down and retrieve the supplies. 

* * *

Day Fourteen 

Waiting had been a mistake. It had rained overnight and the corrugated cardboard boxes now came apart in his hands, causing him to have to carry things up to the cabin in several trips. The flour was ruined, pasty from the damp, but the grits were dry enough to keep. 

It was early evening when he remembered the tree and went back to see what had been put there in the place of Myers' letter. There were two sheets of paper. The first, when opened, contained a question. _Are there any books you would like to have? Please list them here. The next groceries will be dropped off eleven days from now._

The second was not printed as neatly, and had apparently been written on the spot. It said: _When you feel a Buzz, always show yourself. Hiding is nothing but a form of weakness.--Cather_

Cather, he thought, linking her with the picture on his wall. _Connor_ , he thought as he sarcastically saluted the other, and taking the six-pack she had brought, went out by the stoop and drank as fast as he could swallow, but the writing on the note he held refused to blur. 

* * *

Day Seventeen 

Nick took his fourth bath in the river. He slipped six times, coming out feeling less clean than when he had gone in. Like the other three times, not knowing how far out he could go before he was no longer on Holy Ground, he wore his gun harness throughout his ministrations. 

* * *

Day Twenty-one 

The nightmares had returned. 

* * *

Day Twenty-four 

He was eating early breakfast on the front steps when he saw the canoe travelling in the distance, making its usual slow progress toward the island. Nick did not immediately feel the Buzz, and he thought that perhaps Cather hadn't come this time but sent Gris instead. He got up and went inside, checking on his gun in case he was doubly wrong. 

Just as he had replaced the clip, the grip still resting on the heel of his palm, the sensation sucked into him like the heart attack he would never have. 

He didn't want to go out and show himself, but the words still chanted in his head from the note, _a form of weakness_ , and though his body showed its reluctance to comply by turning and moving clumsily, he stepped through the door frame and stood in full view as Cather dragged the canoe on shore. 

Nick was not sure what he thought would happen next, but the other immortal did not acknowledge him in any way, so he took up his usual seat on the front step. 

She unloaded the canoe, placing the supplies down by the tree, and just as he would have expected her to walk up to the cabin to speak with him, she sat down, unhooked the child carrier from her back, and along with the baby--whom he'd decided was a boy--waded barefoot out into the water, very near the spot of his own recent bath. 

The two played in the shallows for an hour or so before drying off and setting out again, never once acting for a moment like there was anyone else within miles, let alone within their line of sight. 

Having learned from his last fiasco with the supplies, Nick moved quickly to get the new shipment inside once Cather had gone. It did not take long, and that night as he drifted off, instead of nightmares he dreamed about childhood vacations with his family on the dunes of Lake Michigan, the grainy feeling of sand in his scalp, the warm heat of sun on his back, and playing with his brothers. 

* * *

Day Twenty-five 

That morning, as he was rooting around in the new supplies for his daily ration of grits, Nick saw the bottom of the box was lined with file folders, in the familiar manila form that had so recently peppered his desks on either side of the Atlantic. 

Tentatively, and all but against his will, he let his first finger brush back the angled edge of the one on top labeled _Kopp, Olsen_. A few flicks and he saw several pages of information, not unlike routine police reports. There was a list of known associates and lovers, spots where the man had been most recently seen, and heads taken. At reading that line, Nick's finger let go its hold on the folder's edge, and the file fell back into place. 

_Not just some trash then_ , he realized. Not even a mistake being delivered in this box, but information being supplied to him. A quick glance down again into the bottom of the box, now bereft of supplies, revealed a stack of file folders almost three inches deep. Deliberately, and without a second thought, he heaved the box onto the table, to join the sword. The weight of the cardboard and the past weeks of neglecting the table top collided in an enormous cloud of dust. 

Disgusted and disgruntled, Nick stalked his way out back of the cabin, trying to convince himself that he really did need to chop more wood. 

* * *

Day Thirty-two 

It should have been a dream, but it was not entirely. Whether it was the wholeness and dimension of the experience, or the knowledge that he had done it all before, he could not have said. 

Nick moved slowly down the aisle of the South Chicago funeral parlor toward his father who stood at the head of a casket. The youngest Wolfe's thirteen-year-old body flinched against the suit and tie--both new to him--their formality uncomfortable, especially in light of the situation. He would much rather be out playing catch, keeping his over-size hands and awkward, fast-growing limbs busy at a job they knew how to do. _But who would be there to throw the ball to once it was caught?_ Not Sandy. 

Nick coughed. It was the closest thing to a sob that he would allow himself. 

"Nicky," said his father, after Nick had been standing at his side trying hard not to look at the set features of his brother Alexander laid out in the casket, also wearing an unfamiliar suit and tie. 

His father's hand came up to Nick's shoulder, where its grip was just a little too heavy, a little too tight. But the pinch at least distracted him. 

_Think about baseball_ , Nick thought to himself. _Think about the game that'll be on the radio tonight. Think_ , he urged himself, _think. Imagine anything but this_. 

"Nicky," his father's voice broke. "Go sit with your mother. I'm not finished here." 

He said this without looking at Nick, without turning his face, which would have made the tears on his cheeks more evident. From the side, Nick told himself it was just a trick of the light. 

_Think. Pop is not cracking up. Bobby Wolfe never cried a day in his life_. Nick coughed again. 

"A peace officer can't afford to have feelings," his dad had once said to him, "not if he wants to do his job right." 

But Pop wasn't doing a job now. Pop was just, he was just... 

The grip on Nick's shoulder tightened, and he imagined the bruise that would grow there tomorrow, as if it would be the only memory of that day. 

* * *

With a gasp and a start Nick sprang from the bed and for his gun. It was perhaps as long as two hours until dawn, and yet the newest, very inner part of his being was vibrating like he had attended an all-immortal Broadway revue. 

Gun in hand, he scanned the large, open space in front of the cabin. He was hesitant to call it a yard. There, wearing a spelunker's head lamp, baby and gear in tow, was Cather, pitching a tent not 700 feet from his front door. 

_What was this nonsense? Wasn't he supposed to be left alone? Wasn't he supposed to be allowed to think? To sort things through? And now this?_

A large German Shepherd circled up the new campsite-in-the-making and then made a bee-line right for the cabin's front door. Forgetting himself, Nick briefly took aim at his canine visitor, but his exhaustion grabbed hold of him quickly, and instead he put out his hand, letting the dog catch his scent. Which it did, right before walking into the cabin as though it were its personal residence. The gesture for some reason gave Nick a brief flash of Amanda. So brief that he barely even had time to register discomfort. 

It sniffed at the dust-covered table of immortal relics, and jumped confidently onto the bed, lounging against the still-warm covers. It lifted its head and cocked its ear toward Nick, who took the hint. 

_What are you doing?_ The dog seemed to say. _She could be at this all morning. Let's have a nap and check on things later._

Tired, and with one last question to his new bedmate of _what does she think she's doing?_ Nick climbed in, the Presence of the new arrival still causing him to shiver every now and then, but the knowledge of Holy Ground acting on him like the perfect lullaby. 

* * *

**Part Two**  
Day Thirty-three: _Indian Camp_

Several hours later Nick was awakened to the sound of someone's voice. His eyes still closed, he wondered briefly at the American accent of the woman calling, "Satchel! Satchel, here boy." 

Still not fully alert, Nick rolled over, no longer interested in the fact there was a new American neighbor on his Parisian block. He rolled right into a mouthful of fur. Dog fur, still attached to its owner. And then he remembered. This morning's early arrival, his confusion. Even--before he could stop himself--his nightmare. 

He pulled back quickly from the inhalation of the dog's coat and sneezed. More than its mistress' voice, this new noise seemed to call the Shepherd into action. Reluctantly, the dog gave Nick one good lick on his bare shoulder, then exited both bed and cabin. No doubt on his way to some breakfast. 

Nick found that although he was keen on some breakfast himself, he was loathe to speak to the person now encamped in his yard. He dressed and ate sitting on the still unmade bed and was on his way out back to chop more wood when he noticed that the Presence was still there, but he had not even really felt it. It seemed to have relegated itself overnight into some lesser area, where it still hummed, but quietly, and in the background. 

He avoided his company easily, either because he holed up inside for the bulk of the day, or because the distaste was mutual and they had no wish to deal with him either. 

That night the dog Satchel once again made an appearance, easily slipping into the bed and a spot that, unconsciously, Nick had been saving in case his canine friend should drop by. 

All day his mind had been skirting the issue of the campground that had sprung up overnight in his front yard, while at the same time trying to understand it. 

Just before he dropped off, his eyes heavy from sleep and denial, it occurred to him that he was under siege. The enemy had marched on his gates that day, and he had invited one of their number into his bed. He did not quite complete the thought that would not register with him the next morning, but he felt sure at that moment that he had given a very poor show of force, and prayed silently that when the impending attack came, he would be alert enough to repel it. 

* * *

Day Thirty-four 

Again, the dream. 

The tie clung too tightly to his neck, and it now had switched around uncomfortably to the side, but he did not reach up to straighten it. The force of his father's strong push toward where his mother sat across the room had propelled him halfway there already, against his own volition. 

Everything that had happened in the past four days had been against what he had wanted. He had wanted to ride in the Torino with Sandy and Jessa. If he had been allowed, he wouldn't be here now, he'd be at the hospital like Mike, with his leg in traction, and ice cream to make him forget. He'd be somewhere else. Anywhere else. He'd be home playing baseball, not here, on his way to stand by his mother where it would be so easy to see the dual caskets in the receiving line, one holding his brother and one holding Jessa, his brother's wife. 

The sea of blue-uniformed officers paying their respects parted for Nick, then slowly dispersed to other parts of the long room as the youngest Wolfe took his place, as commanded, behind his mother's chair. 

He did not know what to do. At the sight of him, his mother had quietly started to cry again. 

Unconsciously echoing his father's earlier gesture, he placed his hand lightly on her shoulder. Her hand came up and caught it, using it as leverage to pull him around for her to see. 

"Nicky," she said, "I thank God you weren't in that car too." Her voice broke for a sob, and Nick wanted to be allowed to go back behind the chair, but her grip held. "It's hard," she said, trying to explain something to him. "It's very hard." 

"I'll get Pop," he offered, trying to subtly work his hand free from hers, holding him here like a chain, weighing him down. Making it impossible to think of anything else. Making baseball seem very far away. 

"No," she said, in the firmest tone her voice had used all day. "Just," she wiped her nose and stopped crying. "Sit with me for awhile." 

Nan Wolfe knew her youngest son at thirteen better than he did himself. She knew he wanted to leave the lay-out, to do something to stay busy, to put this day out of his head, to forget seeing his family--his parents--like this, but she also knew that what he needed was to be still, and to feel safe, and to know that there was nothing wrong with having survived. 

In a brief loss of self-consciousness, Nick looked at his mother, thinking her suddenly very brave, very strong to even have left the house that day. And adding his other hand to hers, spoke with all ardency and conviction. "Don't worry, Mom. I won't leave you." The boy's brow constricted and he coughed. "I'm gonna to live forever." 

Nick gasped awake, finding his body stiff against the mattress of the bed. His breathing, unlike the other times he had come back from his multitude of recent nightmares, was calm and regular. He had a great deal of difficulty recalling where the dream had taken him and what it had been about. He seemed to remember his mother. 

An unfamiliar squall from the yard brought Satchel to life next to him, sending the Shepherd bounding from the bed without looking back, shooting out the door, and setting up his own barking alongside the squalling, which, though familiar, Nick could not place. 

He could not feel the Buzz. He noticed that, suspiciously stealing a look out the window and into the yard, thinking perhaps Cather had moved on. There was no sign of Cather, but her things still dotted the two-day-old campsite. Growing more confidant and more troubled by the noise, Nick followed the sound to what he thought was a brightly-colored mesh cage, but what on closer inspection proved to be a tented playpen, hungry child included. 

He took a step back. Not his problem. Not on his list of duties: _feed/change abandoned child_. He thought about going back into the cabin, maybe chopping some more wood. Surely Cather would return. Surely she could not have meant to leave the child alone in the wildness. _Not alone_ , said a contrary part of him _, you're here, and Satchel certainly keeps a good watch._

Satchel seemed to sense Nick's hesitancy in the matter and, with the flat of his head, pushed Nick's leg in the direction of the child, whose cries had not settled down. 

_You know a thing or two about babies_ , Nick counseled himself. _Didn't Katie Marie have three?_ Hadn't he watched them be fed countless times? Given a hand on several occasions? 

He scanned the area for a cooler, somewhere the formula could be kept. In his search, he also managed to find two novels that, unless his and Cather's taste ran exactly the same, were the titles he had requested she bring to him with the last batch of supplies. 

Juggling _The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Day of Mourning,_ and the bottle he had found, Nick returned to the baby, deciding that if dealing with the front end didn't work, he'd move to the back end. It seemed fair enough. 

He had a rather difficult time getting the tented top off of the playpen. The child, no longer squalling, was making grunting and mewing noises as if he knew help had finally arrived. 

"Well, come on then, Sport," Nick encouraged the little guy, before reaching down to pick him up. He caught a brief shiver as his hands met the child's skin, and wondered aloud if fall was finally on its way. 

The child was not able to walk yet, but as evidenced when Nick went to get him out of the playpen, could pull himself up on his fat, wobbly legs to stand. 

He was not talking yet either, although Nick imagined once or twice the child jabbered, "Ath," wondering as well where Cather was. 

As he used his fingers to straighten the baby's thick, unruly shock of black hair, Nick mused briefly over how how odd it was to be able to touch a baby anywhere--hair, toes, back of the neck--places that in a few years a friendly tickle would not be welcome, and how a happy baby could make you feel pleasant. Happy even. 

He walked around the yard a while, feeding the small boy his bottle and taking an odd sense of pride in the large black eyes--for the child was Native American too--that met his in a sleepy sort of wonder. 

Fifteen minutes later the bottle was empty, and still no Cather in sight. Nick (somewhat less reluctantly than he would have liked to admit) brought the now sleeping child into the cabin, bolstering a space among the bed's pillows so that the baby could not roll off, and laid him down to be looked after by himself and Satchel. 

Some time later, the child's cries woke him up from his place against the nearby wall, where he had inexplicably shared the tot's nap. Nick was cramped from the accordion-like position he had taken when he had sat down with his copy of Mack Bolan's sixty-second adventure, planning to read through the afternoon as he watched the baby and waited for Cather to return. Now, instead of having caught up with the novel's hero, he was busy working a charley horse out of his lower back. 

The diaper had leaked during the sojourn on the bed, and Nick silently cursed. He did not have a very adequate system for doing laundry. But he soon realized that the condition of the bed was nothing to the condition of the baby, who would have to be washed. 

Search and search as he could, he could not find the large metal tub where he usually did every chore from laundry to dishes. It would have to be the lake, then. 

Having no swim trunks of which to avail himself, and seeing little need to wade into the water fully clothed, Nick stripped down, agreeing with the naked, happily gurgling baby in his arms, that things did indeed feel nicer au natural. 

A quick clean-up in the shallows served as a nice bath for both of them, and as the early evening came on, and Nick's bedtime with it, there was still no sign of Cather. Bringing along the last made-up bottle for the child, Nick retreated indoors with Satchel. He stripped and re-made the bed. No easy task holding a child, but he had nowhere to put him down. 

For the first time, the dog occupied the floor so that the baby could have his spot, bunkered once again by pillows to stop a fall or accidental roll-over. 

Nick nodded off, angry with Cather, wherever she was, and not realizing that he hadn't had time all day for a single thought about himself. 

* * *

Day Thirty-five 

_Buzz_. Very strong, very insistent. Very close. Reach for gun--not there. 

"What do you think you're doing?" leapt out of his mouth faster than any idea or image could form. 

"Getting Iain into a clean diaper," came the composed reply from the floor, where Cather knelt, just as she said, putting a clean diaper on the baby under the watchful eye of Satchel, who had resumed his usual place on the bed. 

Nick felt invaded, and a leery sense of pending unpleasantness settled on him, partially from the power of the Buzz at this range, partially because he could not see his gun. 

Her eyes were quicker than his. "It's over on the table," she offered, finishing up with the diaper pins. 

His eyes scanned across the room. She was right, it was there. 

He made to stand, but recognizing his own condition--unaltered from the bath last night--retreated again beneath the covers; motivated less by embarrassment than by a sense of weakness and unprotectedness. 

Cather moved to the table, Iain on one hip, his baby fingers playing interestedly with the bumps on the long, black braid that fell past her waist. 

Fishing around for a moment in the box of files, she took out one off the top, the only one Nick had ever touched. 

"You won't need this anymore," she offered conversationally. "Got whacked last week in Paris. By a friend of yours." She anticipated his response before he even had it. "No, not Amanda, although she would have had reason enough." 

Again that sour expression Gris had used at the saying of her name. 

"Caitlin Richards." Cather smiled down at Iain in response to one of his coos. "You met her, what, about six months ago? She's been very busy since then." 

Her eyes came back up to Nick's, which wore a surly expression. _What does she want?_ He had no idea. He didn't want her, or her intrusive files. Or her sword, or her cabin _. Okay, it wasn't her cabin, and he actually wanted it quite a lot. But to himself. And now._

Cather's head tilted to the side. "So you're not getting up then?" She had the posture of someone waiting. 

"I don't need your help," Nick replied, egged on by the nausea in his gut. "Why should I trust you?" He almost spat the words. "You don't even care enough to look after your own baby." His head was throbbing and he thought he might be sick. He just wanted her out. Out. So he could collect his thoughts. 

Something in what he said must have pushed her to cross a line she had been planning to observe. It may have been the comment about Iain, or the tone of voice with which he addressed her, or even some base current neither of them could see or explain. No matter where the blame could be placed, the turn did not bode well for Nick. 

"That's fair enough," she said reasonably, moving back to the table, the box of files, the sword, with a sigh. "I'm pretty much at the end of my rope here, Nick Wolfe." 

Her voice had a dangerous edge that he could not imagine coming from someone with a child in their arms, but it was nonetheless. 

"You've been given every possible comfort, every resource available, the ability to come to a quiet place, somewhere you could take refuge and figure things out." She paused and shifted the baby's weight. "And as far as I can see, all you've done is drink beer and chop enough wood to build Noah's Ark." 

She turned to face him where he lay, swathed in the bedclothes, the Viking sword he had for so long ignored and refused to look at coming dangerously at him in his line of sight. 

It was an odd image, child on one hip, weapon in the other. Iain stopped what he had been doing and grew quiet, as if he knew something important was happening. 

"I saw yesterday that you've let yourself go, you haven't even been in training." Her eyes raked his form under the covers. The scar above her right eye grew prominently white. "You've been sitting around losing muscle mass and endurance. You're a waste." 

"What are you talking about," he sputtered, making the connection. "You were watching yesterday when we, when I. The missing wash tub--it was all some kind of a trick?" 

The sword was coming closer and closer, and he was no longer able to imagine that she was just testing it out, getting the dust off, getting ready to take it and leave. 

"Won't you even get up and fight?" she asked. Her mouth and eyes as unreadable as those of Gris. 

_She could not be serious._

"Or would you prefer to die for the sake of modesty?" Her eyebrow raised, and the sword flicked in the light. 

The word _vengeance_ popped into Nick's head. 

"You won't kill me here," he said, sounding much less sure than he felt--thought he felt. 

"You don't know me," she said, a small laugh at the back of her throat. "You don't know anything about me. Whether I even play by the rules." Two quick steps forward and she had him pinned. 

The metal of the sword was cold against his neck as he backed himself against the headboard in an effort not to come too close in contact with it. His gun. Too far away. 

"C'mon, fight," she demanded. "Fight back. Now." Her voice unflinching. 

"No," he said, "no," and it sounded strangled. He had no weapon, nothing. He was helpless. "I can't." He grabbed at the last absolute in his catechism, almost unable to shake his head no under the pressure of the blade. "You won't kill me on Holy Ground." 

"If you won't fight, then you die," she offered. "And I'm not afraid of killing you as many times as it takes until you decide you want to live." 

The blade came quickly away from his neck, Nick's eyes trained on Cather's impassive ones as she buried the Viking metal in his chest. The last thing he remembered was hearing a very different voice come from his assassin. 

"I only hope," she addressed the child on her hip in a disappointed tone, "he'll tire of this quickly." She withdrew the sword. 

And for the second time in his life, Nick Wolfe died. 

* * *

Day Thirty-six 

When Nick came to, instinctively sucking air in his lungs like they would never again be filled, Cather was still there, seated next to the table. The baby, however, had disappeared. Satchel had eschewed the bed, his black and brandy fur curled instead at Cather's feet. 

"There are only two irrefutable truths about Immortality," she began, not moving from her seat in the still-dark unlit cabin. "One, if I cut off your head, you die, and two, if we fight a mortal combat on Holy Ground, we both die, and lots of people with us. Anything else you've heard is just speculation." 

She spoke with her earlier impassiveness, without even the inflection of someone delivering a lecture. As the last word left her mouth, she pushed back the wooden chair against the hard board floor, and left. 

"I hate you," Nick said, looking after her as she walked down the path to her tent. _Hate you_. He wished for a moment that she had killed him. Shot and dragged him off the island and ended the whole thing. _I hate you, Cather Longwood of East Texas,_ he thought _, with your silent eyes and your immortality. I'm not even supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be dead. Several times over_. 

And an idea began to form somewhere slowly, in the back of his mind, like a tunneling prisoner, scraping away at the dirt floor in their cell; gently, methodically, their muted actions calling up the means of escape in desperate, unarticulated petition. 

* * *

Day Thirty-eight 

_Buzz._ Eyes snap open. Someone at the table. Her. Twinge from yesterday's sword, imagined or real, felt in chest. Audibly wheeze. 

" _Nick Wolfe_ ," Cather read aloud, in the small light just before dawn, aided by a Coleman lamp she had brought up from her things. She held one of the manila folders in her hands. Only moments ago she had taken it from the box which still occupied the table. 

She read not to teach herself anything new, to unearth some undiscovered possibility for waking up Nick--she had memorized this file several weeks ago, never dreaming that when she finally came to the wilderness around Seacouver that he'd be as bad off as he was now; disheveled, heavily bearded, shaggy haired. _Who's afraid of Nick Wolfe?_ she had asked herself the other night after killing him, disappointedly concluding that the only viable answer was Nick Wolfe. 

Perhaps in relating the contents of his file to him, she could spark some memory, something he could grab on to, use to propel himself out of the lonely isolation he had created here. 

_Duncan would never have invited him if he had known how he'd use it._ Not as a retreat, but as a cloister, shutting out whatever he didn't want, and not letting anything--anyone--in. Still, there was the other day with Iain to consider. It was the first, and so far, the only thing to let her hope that there was still something inside this man able to connect outside of himself. 

She read on. 

" _Born Nicklaus Charles, confirmed Patrick, Wolfe, the youngest of four, to Nan Campbell and Bobby Wolfe. Named for PGA golfer Jack Nicklaus, Wolfe often alters the spelling, possibly out of dislike for his given name_." 

"How do you know that?" Nick asked, in his earlier bad mood. Still resenting the intrusion. 

Ignoring his question, Cather read on. " _Bobby Wolfe, Irish immigrant, Catholic, police lieutenant, Chicago's 55th. Wife Nan, nee Campbell, on-and-off second grade teacher._

Siblings Alexander Koufax, Michael Sean, Katie Marie, now O'Malley. Married Cork O'Malley; three daughters, one miscarriage, a son. 

Eldest brother Alexander 'Sandy' died, 1979 at age 23 in car accident with wife Jessa. Michael Sean survived accident, underwent lengthy recovery. Divorced, no children, District Attorney, state of Illinois. Both parents living." 

"How do you know that?" Nick did not want to hear anymore. It was bad enough dreaming of Sandy at night, worse now to have a total stranger telling him his life. "Who told you this?" 

Again, the only reply came in more reading aloud. 

" _Wolfe had the part of Skye Masterson in his Senior play Guys and Dolls, served a brief but unfulfilling stint in the Navy Reserves, has an almost paranoiac fear of needles, and often argued with his ex-wife over music. Most notably his love for Bonnie Raitt singing the blues. His wife, Lauren, deceased now four months, preferred Raitt's pop-flavored standards._

_It is believed the couple would have reconciled their many differences had she not died unexpectedly."_ Cather allowed the folder to close. "There's more, but I won't go on boring you. You've lost a lot of important people in your life, Nick. Friends, partner, wife--most of them in the past sixteen months." 

She thought about telling him that her own recent past had not been so different, thought of telling him about Lange, wondered if he would take comfort in that knowledge. But he jumped to a snappy reply rather than addressing the facts with the gravity they deserved. 

"If you're auditioning to be my teacher, you've made a very bad impression," he said. _Get out of my house._ "And if you're trying to drum up new clientele as some kind of psychoanalyst, as you can see," he showed off the cabin's only room, "We haven't got a couch." _Get off of my island._

Something internally told Nick that he did not want to face the things she represented, and that somehow, by allowing her into the cabin, he was accepting something, agreeing to certain things that he did not want as part of his life. _Life, ha. He was dead._

"Winter is coming on," Cather offered. "I don't imagine that you would make it very long out here on your own." 

Even Nick knew that she was kindly understating the matter. 

"And I haven't noticed any particular invitations arriving for you in the mail, from teachers, psychoanalysts, or benefactors." 

Though her face carried its usual masked expression, Cather was not happy. She didn't like doing things this way. She would much rather have waited, but the weather was starting to turn, as it did so early up here in the mountains, and it had made the decision for her, that it would have to be the hard way. And to think that she had assured Duncan that she'd wait. That it was her style. Well, she guessed she was acquiring a new style. Pushing someone to the brink, and praying, praying they didn't tumble over. "You'll have to go somewhere." 

"What could you possibly teach me?" Nick asked, his voice sneering loud with ego, as he took in the small, youthful frame of the woman sitting at the table, her small, though dexterous hands, and fluid eyes that left him wondering if she ever heard what he said, if his responses mattered at all. Wondering if she really thought she could know anything about him from a list of his vitals. 

Cather stood slowly on her way out, deliberately giving her face an expression of exasperation that was not such a stretch from her feeling at the moment. "Everybody can teach you something," she said, and disappeared through the front door, leaving him alone for the rest of the day, with only a typed-out dossier of his life for company. 

He decided the file seemed only to lack an eulogy to be complete. 

Nick knew being ignored by his enemy was meant to be a punishment. By late afternoon, it almost was. 

* * *

Day Thirty-nine 

Still angry and still determined, Nick went out the next morning to find Cather and give her a further piece of his mind. But she was not there, and neither was Iain in his playpen. Nick assumed they must have gone for a walk, but catching a pair of high-powered binoculars in his line of sight, and realizing they were undoubtedly the ones she had used to spy on him, he quickly decided that turn-about was fair play. 

It did not take him long to find them, playing near the island's eastern edge, yet out of the range of sensing. He sat himself down by a tree, knowing that he was far enough away that if she wasn't looking for him--and he saw no reason why she should be--he would blend in nicely with the undergrowth. 

Binoculars to his eyes, he watched as Iain and Cather splashed about in the shallows, as they had what seemed so long ago, playing like small children. _Why couldn't Cather be this person around him?_ Why instead did he keep confronting an angry, violent woman whose only purpose in life seemed to be to cause him trouble and recall to his mind the new-born pains of his unwanted existence? 

Nick felt sure her demeanor around him was not his fault. It must be hers then. Something--but he was caught in the middle of the thought, when the subject of his internal monologue began to take her hair out of the type of braid it had been in since she arrived and toss aside her clothes. Free falling and blue-black, it spun around her in the air, like a fine curtain, or rich garment covering her from head to thigh, as she stepped out into the deeper part of the lake for a bath. 

Nick did not stop watching or turn away. It had been weeks since he had thought about a woman. All those paths seemed to lead him straight back to Amanda, a destination he wished at all costs to avoid when he could. He saw her often enough in his dreams. 

Besides, he told himself, Cather had done the same thing to him. But excuses and logical thought quickly dried up in the wake of the scene before him, as she turned, her body no longer obscured by her hair. 

Cather was small-boned. Her hips were impossibly narrow, and her skin was the color of a California redwood against the other trees reflected on the water. 

She looked like she belonged here, in the woods, her hair unbraided and floating about her, stretching and whorling as though it were part of the ripples her movement sent out. 

The babbling calls of Iain, whom she had left on shore with Satchel, came to Nick's ear across the water. Cather apparently heard as well and finished up, collecting her hair to the side in one hand as she rose, revealing a long, jagged scar cutting from the arc of her left shoulder above the collar bone, across her breast, and ending at her sternum. 

It was then that Nick came back to himself and looked away. Startled by what he had seen--the contrast of the harmony of one moment somehow betrayed by the violence in the next, his hand unsteadily lowered the binoculars, sending a flash of light out to the bather, who halted, still nude, and unabashedly looked in the direction of the flicker before collecting the baby in her arms, and drying off. 

* * *

Day Forty 

"If you're going to spy while I bathe," Cather said noncommittally, walking in on him while he ate breakfast, "I might as well stay here as go to the trouble of trying to find somewhere private." 

Nick tried to explain, that peeping hadn't been his intent. She didn't seem to care about his intent--at the least she was not angry. 

"I see you've begun looking at a few of the files." She was obviously pleased. 

"Where did you get these?" he asked, feeling affronted that others as well as his own were so chock-full of information. Private things. 

"A lot of hard work," she responded. "Some money, some sleuthing. You'd be surprised what people will tell you, often for nothing. Lange and Gris have spent years--decades--of their lives compiling them." 

"Watchers?" Nick asked warily, not recalling anything about Gris' wrist. 

"No," Cather said. "Gris was with the Watchers a long time ago, long before he and Lange found me. He was assigned to Lange, but he found the 'not interfering' part a little too over-simplified." 

"When he broke with them they didn't kill him?" Nick thought back to what he knew of Watcher policy for renegades, and oath-breakers. 

Cather paused a moment, wondering how to explain. "You've obviously never tried to kill Gris," she smiled. "They gave up after about ten years or so of failed attempts. Besides, I think deep down they hope to get their hands on his files when he dies, or that in a moment of weakness, he'll realize that he never should have left them, and cross back over." 

"You think they'd take him back on, just for the sake of a few files?" Nick gestured to the box on his desk. 

"Hardly a few, Nick. Around seventeen-hundred files, active and out of circulation, sketches of their subjects, the occasional surveillance photo. From what we know of things, the most complete, uncorrupted Immortal tracking system in existence." 

"Computerized?" 

"No, Lange and Gris agreed that it would be quite something to manage to spirit all seventeen-hundred files away from the L Bar L. A sight more difficult than downloading, or swiping a diskette--or CD, if you've been entertained with that Watcher fiasco." 

Cather did not like Watchers. She had been raised in an environment of absolute disdain for their profession. Immortal stalkers, often breaking their own code, aiding and abetting in order to advance their own champions in The Game, all under the guise of recording for the sake of posterity. Their organization was incestuous, far-from-covert, and mortally flawed. 

The last ones she had met had been little different, save that they had been looking for Duncan MacLeod, staking out the L Bar L two years ago. Finally, realizing that wouldn't work, they showed up on her doorstep under numerous false pretenses in an effort to get inside; cow hand, cook, maid, repairman, newspaper reporter, social worker; even trying to replace her accountant. 

Finally they had sent Joe Dawson--or he had chosen to come on his own--to appeal to her for information. She couldn't say that she had liked him so very much either. But then again, as her own file back at the L Bar L would show, she was not easily disposed to trust people. 

"Lange's life-work. He catalogued nearly every immortal that he had ever met with the help of Gris, and on occasion, myself. The drawings are his." Her eyes, usually veiled, took on a faraway set for a moment, before she pulled them willfully back into the present. 

"When did he die?" Nick asked, correctly interpreting her distancing reaction to 'life's work.' 

"Nineteen ninety-six," she said. "By Kronos, a.k.a. Melvin Koren, who was busy at that time cutting a wide swath across the West on his way up to Seacouver." 

"Is he still alive?" Nick asked, really wondering, _Did you get your revenge?_

"No. Gris followed him, but lost his trail just outside of Seacouver. Duncan MacLeod took his head almost a year later, in Paris." 

"Gris followed him all the way to Paris?" 

"No, Duncan told us. He showed up at the ranch six months or so after, looking for Lange." 

She had put it lightly, that he had showed up, as though he had stopped in for a drink. It had been more like washed up on the desert. She had found him one day as she was riding, a man she could sense was immortal, emaciated from walking across the scrub for days, far from a source of water, in the throes of death by snake bite. A man who had refused even to give her his name. But a name she had known from the very files she and Nick were discussing. 

"Is this after he killed Richie Ryan? He came to see you?" Nick had an old detective's flash, of finding a piece to a mystery that no one else had uncovered. 

The question jarred Cather. She of course knew about Richie. Duncan had told her that much, as had Joe Dawson, and some British snot Adam Pierson. Even Amanda had come by, all long after Duncan had left, offering pieces into what had happened in Paris. And all wanting pieces of MacLeod, pieces of himself that at that time he didn't have the ability to give. 

"I, ah, didn't know you knew about that, but yes. He came looking for Lange." 

Actually, as far as Cather was concerned, Lange, now part of Duncan from Kronos' Quickening, had come looking for her--the only way he could, taking advantage of Duncan's overcome psyche, and directing his one-time friend to the exact place he himself would have sought solace. 

"He stayed because he was in no condition to move on after finding out that Lange was dead." 

Nick felt the silence following that final remark was not one he was going to be allowed to break. Something about Duncan MacLeod made his friends very protective of him, hesitant to give out information, and dead-set against judging or even reproaching him for what he'd done to his student. Nick once again wondered what kind of man--this man to whom he was also now indebted--inspired such loyalty. 

* * *

Day Forty-one 

"Today's lesson," Cather's voice woke him again. He was mystified by her ability to be up in the pre-dawn day after day, and to be alert when his head was still fuzzy with sleep. 

It was quite a reversal from Mademoiselle _"Lunch-at-three"_ Montrose. 

He got out of bed and pulled on some pants and a shirt, knowing that completing whatever she wanted was the path of least resistance to breakfast. 

"I've been meaning to find out," she asked, "how many languages do you know?" 

"Uh," Nick didn't want to over-speak himself here, but he was rather proud of his accomplishment in the area of linguistics. "Three, including English, although my spoken Spanish is better than my written." 

"Oh," she said, not sounding at all pleased. Immortals needed as many avenues open to them for communication, although admittedly, she realized most headhunters did acknowledge English as the newest world language. 

Feeling slighted, his pride a little bruised, Nick threw the question back. "And how many do you have?" 

"I speak eight," Cather replied, entirely nonplussed, still thinking about others that Nick should endeavor to learn. "And I read twelve." Absently she added, "Thirteen if you count Gothic, although it's technically dead, so it's really more for entertainment. But then so is Latin. I should say I speak seven, and read eleven." 

Nick still sat, silent in response. 

Cather tried again to lessen her claim. "Besides," she countered herself, "I usually count all the Native American languages and dialects as one, and since they're not really in use anymore, to be fair, I shouldn't count them at all." She felt the desire to blush. he looked so unhappy. "So you know, really six. Just six." 

Nick was quiet for a time, while Cather moved to the table, toying with one of the folders. She had not meant to embarrass Nick, and made a mental note that next time she should remember that not everyone had been brought up with the knowledge of what they would be and the education designed to maximize their potential. That was a special gift Lange had given her, one she would share with Iain. 

"Back to the lesson," she repeated her earlier purpose for having come to the cabin. "The Buzz, the Quickening, the Presence, the seventh sense, call it what you will, we've all got it, even before we cross over. When you hold Iain do you feel anything?" 

"Like what?" Nick asked. 

"Anything." 

"A shiver, I guess," he recalled. "Very light. It always makes me think the day is going to turn a little cold." His mind did the math. "Are you saying Iain is--will be?" 

"Yes," she responded. "Iain is immortal. If he lives long enough before his first death, he'll be raised knowing what he is, and how to be the best he can be at it. It's how I was raised." Something in her thanked God that it had been Lange's way, that she would never have to grapple with the spectre of free will like Nick, or the shock of waking up from the dead. 

She recalled the day it had happened, the accident that sent her horse rearing, the disgust and disbelief that she had not been able to hang on, and the snapped neck that ensued. Waking painfully as if from the haze of anesthesia after surgery to see that she was alone, and no one had witnessed her own little miracle taking place somewhere in her corner of Texas. 

"You've always known?" He was incredulous. 

"Always," she agreed, to his shock. "I found Iain, like I was found, at an orphanage." 

She had been four, at the home in Colorado, and a man--an immortal--whose name she did not even know, had recognized what she would be, and was in the process of killing her, cutting her up to awaken it. Then he would have taken her head. Gris and Lange had been coming to get her and take her home with them when they found her, sliced open and bleeding to death. Gris cradled her, waiting for her to die while Lange had easily ended the other immortal's life. 

But she had not died, had not passed into her immortality, doomed to become four years old until someone took pity on her and completed her enemy's task. Instead she healed, and over time grew; two prominent scars testimonies to her rescue. 

"But, what about me?" Nick asked, not knowing how it could be possible. "I was an orphan?" 

"Most likely your parents might have lost a child, and found someone else in the hospital needing to place one--something like that. The switch must have been pretty discreet, because the birth certificate gives no other information than the names Nan and Bobby Wolfe. Your dad might have had some pull at county records. It isn't always clear how these things work out. You knew about the foundling idea, right?" Cather looked at Nick, who had been coming along so normally, so well today, afraid she had pitched him back over the edge. 

"Yeah," he agreed. He had known, but had forgotten, buried it somewhere in the back of his mind. "I knew, I just don't know how." 

"Well," Cather wasn't sure she should throw this line to him. "Like I said before, we only know two things for certain. The foundling rule could merely be speculation. It has never been either proved or disproved." _Don't bail out on me now, Nick Wolfe. I don't want to have to kill you again to get your attention._

She struggled to get them back on track, and far away from anything that could directly be construed as upsetting. "Today's lesson, The Buzz." 

"Take a deep breath and let the Buzz settle," Nick offered, from somewhere in the back of his mind. 

"No," Cather said, "touch me." 

"Huh?" Nick thought he hadn't heard her right. He did not recall Amanda sharing this with Cat. 

"You've never touched another Immortal skin to skin, right?" 

He tried half-heartedly to remember, but his memory of that day with Peyton and Amanda did not disappoint him and stayed deliberately black. He felt like asking Cather to ask him again, in his dreams. He was pretty sure he got to relive the whole thing over again down to the smallest detail nightly. 

"Or if you did it was right after your death and your radar probably wasn't working quite right yet. So touch me." Cather was wearing long sleeves, with a v-neck. She had expected Nick to grab her hand, or possibly touch her face. She stood, waiting. In all honesty, it had been a while since she had touched another immortal herself, besides handling the pre-born Iain. 

Instead of going for her hand or face, a curious look in his eye, Nick, unconsciously remembering the day he had followed her, let his two fingers pull back slightly on the v-neck, and let his skin, warm and calloused, rest near the cool rise of her scar. 

A jolt. Immediately they made eye-contact. 

"Is that?" he asked perplexed, wondering why no one had ever mentioned this. 

"No, that's," Cather deliberately stepped back, her boots falling perhaps a little too heavily on the floor. "That's a lesson for quite another day," she replied, leaving Nick feeling like the shock he felt coursing through his veins (and down below his belt) called for some apology to the clearly flummoxed Cather. 

"Did I?" he asked, embarrassed, "the scar?" 

"No," she answered, a little overly-breezy. Trying very hard to fight down the images of the last time any man had touched her in that way. "That's not the scar, that's, a different sort of sensation." She went on, recovering herself. "Emotions, feelings, desires, all these things can get tangled up in a Buzz, particularly when you touch. It's something to be aware of in a fight. Even in an interaction, you need to be on top of things, so you don't give anything away that can be used against you." 

A very quiet moment passed. Cather's expression had returned to its usual neutrality, and Nick's own sensations were receding. 

"Try again," she said, sure to add, "my hand this time." She lifted it up vertically, palm to him. 

Nick let his hand move cautiously across the space between them, hoping that he could suppress whatever he had sent in her direction last time. Just before their palms came together, two tiny sparks of electricity, the kind children scuffed their feet on carpet to create, leapt from Cather's hand onto Nick's, instantly renewing the prior heat in both. 

"I'm sorry." This time it was Cather's turn to apologize. 

Nick caught her hand firmly before she could pull it away. "What's going on?" he asked. 

"There's no time for this," she replied, rolling her eyes upward, her mouth turning into a line. 

"Are you talking to me, or to you?" Nick asked, confused by what had occurred. 

Iain gave a squall from outside, making it easy for her not to answer. 

"Lesson over," Cather said, exiting the cabin, and staying low and out of sight for the rest of the day. 

* * *

**Part Three**  
Day Forty-two: _Il faut durer_

Nick was again at the funeral of his brother, this time older, wearing the same black three-button suit he had worn to Richie Ryan's service. Sandy's coffin rested at the front of the room along with Jessa's, but Nick could not manage to find his way to the front through the push and swell of mourners. 

"Nick," he heard someone shriek, and saw a figure faint up near the receiving line. That gave him the strength to finally clear the throng and make his way to the front. It was his mother. A familiar head bent low near the unconscious Nan Wolfe, in an effort to get her to breathe. 

"Mrs. Wolfe, Mrs. Wolfe, Nan," the person assisting was saying. When she raised her head he saw that it was Claudia. 

"Partner," he managed to choke out, wildly glad to see her, and he moved closer. 

But Claudia, instead of being pleased to see him--glad to be alive herself--took a step back, her eyes registering that she had seen him, but with the recognition came fear and horror. She moved away from the body of his mother. 

"Claudia!" he yelled, over the crowd and noise, but she had backed up, into one of the caskets, turning to look down at who it held. 

"No," she said. "No. It can't be you, you're dead. You're dead!" 

Alarmed, Nick moved to see the casket, expecting the image of Sandy that had haunted him so recently. Instead, he saw his own face, fixed and set with death. He shrank back, moving quickly to the other casket. Lauren. He let out a sob. 

Behind him, he heard his mother regain consciousness. "He promised me, Claudia!" she called, wailing. "He promised me this would never happen to him." 

Lauren opened her eyes to him, as beautiful in death as they had been any day of her life. 

"You're supposed to be with me, Nick. We're supposed to be together, forever." Her voice changed from one of confusion to rage. "You promised. _Forever_." She reached up and grabbed his hand. Her grip cold and waxy. 

She frightened him in her anger, and he jumped back from her reach, into the arms of...Amanda. 

He did not know what she was doing at Sandy's--no, his--funeral. 

"C'mon, Lover," she said, possessively taking his arm to guide him away. Kissing him deeply, she added, "we've got a lot of living to do." 

He found his hands with a will of their own, caressing her hips and back. 

"You bastard," he heard Claudia say before he felt her smack his face. "She killed me as much as that dirty SOB that pulled the trigger. And unless I heard wrong, she killed you too!" 

"Nick, what are you doing?" his mother asked. 

"They're just jealous," Amanda said. "You're mine. Forever." 

"You promised me forever," Lauren called. 

I'll kill you as many times," Cather promised, sinking the blade in deeper. "I'll kill you, I'll kill you, I'll kill you. _Forever._ " 

Nick woke, horrified, and with that horror found the resolve left over from the emotion of his dream. He would do it. 

Grabbing the sword off the table, touching it for the first time since he arrived, he walked out to Cather's tent. The sword still showed the signs of wear from the other night, where she had stabbed him through, blood-dried and gruesome looking. 

"Your sword needs cleaning," Cather commented, as her head came out of the tent opening. She was carrying Iain. The gentle prod was an attempt at by-passing a discussion of the prior evening. 

"How far out do we have to go before it's no longer Holy Ground?" Nick asked. 

"Not far," she replied, without understanding. 

"Then let's do it." 

"What?" she asked, her mind too much a mix of things that had taken place since her arrival to sift out his meaning. 

"You can have my head," he told her. "I'll give it to you. It's yours, so long as I get to die." He felt great relief just at saying it out loud. "You said yourself you weren't afraid of killing me." 

_He wasn't supposed to be alive anyway. He'd cheated. She'd cheated for him. His place was with Claudia and Lauren. With the dead._

"No offense, Nick," Cather replied, mistakenly taking a flippant tone. "But I don't think it would do me much good. You're 0 for 0 in your newly professional status." 

Nick, however, was entirely serious. 

He extended the Viking sword to her, palms up, not realizing he was touching his own blood. 

"I'm a walking dead man," he said, his expression as overcast as the coming bluish dawn. "She made me this way, without my consent, without any thought to what I wanted." He did not look at Cather, but instead focused far in the distance. "I want to die. It's my decision." 

"Remember what I told you the other day?" Cather asked, unsure he was in a place where he could even hear her what she had to say. "We only know two things for sure; heads and Holy Ground. The Gathering, there can be only one, the rule of foundlings, it's all hearsay. Old wives' tales. Mythology." She put her hand out to Nick's shoulder, but he jerked it back, out of her reach. He was at least that present. "She didn't make you, Nick. She's not The Blue Fairy, who finally turns you into a real boy." 

But he wasn't listening. He felt far away already, detached. The part of him that was real, the part that he understood and had carried around inside of him for the past thirty or so years--his soul, a priest would say--half-way on its journey somewhere else, beyond the lake, beyond the earth, toward some sort of peace. 

Instinctively, he answered her anyway. "Everyone I care about will die, has died. Why am I still here? What did I ever do to deserve such a punishment?" 

Cather cautiously took the sword from him, after setting Iain down near her feet. Her hopes for Nick Wolfe were shredding before her very eyes. She had taken him to the brink, and here he was, throwing himself off. She debated what to do. 

Forgetting about Holy Ground, he was so wrapped up in his own thoughts, Nick got down on his hands and knees, and held his neck out in anticipation of the coming death-blow. 

Cather Longwood was not going to give in to this man's newest whim. She had not given in to the others; his desire to be left alone, his cowering. If he was willing to throw himself over the edge of this abyss, at least he was now willing to acknowledge there was such an edge. He had accepted on some level what he was, and how he could be killed. She chose to see such an acceptance as an accomplishment. 

Cather sent the Viking sword deep into the soft earth near the shore where they stood. She could see that Nick was crying silently; he had probably not noticed it himself. She knelt down next to him. 

"There's nothing wrong with being alive, Nick," she said softly, in a voice he had often heard her use with the baby, but never with him. "Nothing wrong with wanting to live." 

She rocked him gently back off his knees, and sat with her arms around him, his back to her chest, as he looked off into the receding distance. "It's hard," she agreed. "Most don't understand anything when they come over. But you've already seen all the horrible things immortality can do. The loss, the greed, the guilt. I won't take your head, not here, not now. Not anytime." She hugged him more tightly. "You're going to be one of the good ones, Nick Wolfe, and there are so few of us left. I'm afraid I can't spare you. You're going to live," she crooned, "you're going to live." 

Giving a bone-deep sigh of admission, and shaken with tears, Nick let his hand settle lightly on top of hers, near his shoulder. 

The two sat, twined together, and watched the dawn break, turning the sky blue and purple and finally yellow, as the day sprang to life. 

* * *

Day Forty-three 

Breakfast found the trio eating for the first time at the cabin's table, now emptied of its earlier accoutrements. 

"We leave tomorrow," Cather had announced, stirring butter into her grits. "That is, if you'll come with us?" 

"I'd like that," Nick agreed, his mind taking the next logical step. Still waiting for the previous day to settle, he spoke tentatively. "You'll be my teacher then?" 

"Like I said," Cather replied, "everybody can teach you something, but I'm not the person for that job. We're not well-matched in size, you might have noticed." 

"I don't know," Nick said humorously, "I think maybe you could take me." 

"You'll need lessons with a sword. Gris can teach you at the ranch." 

"But Gris isn't..." 

"No, he isn't, but he's the best swordsman I know--excepting perhaps four immortals that I could name." 

"But how?" 

"Lange taught him everything he knew, greedy for someone to fight. Gris caught on. Both he and Lange taught me, along with the occasional tutor." 

"How old was Lange, when he was killed?" Nick asked out of curiosity. 

"I don't know," Cather answered honestly. "Tribal peoples don't really use dates the same way we have grown to think of them." She knew that Lange had never minded not being able to pinpoint his age, having come from a people who gauged the passage of time by the moon. "He could remember, though vaguely, when his people had traveled across the land bridge into North America." 

"You must really miss him," Nick offered, not knowing what else to say, tongue-tied as usual in the face of eternity. 

"He was my father, for all practical purposes," Cather replied, deliberately understating the truth in an effort not to lose her composure. "He was the best man I've ever known." _And now his spirit rests with Duncan MacLeod._

* * *

Final Day  
Day Forty-four 

"Cather," Nick asked, "how old are you?" 

"Twenty-seven," she answered, smiling. 

"No, really," he prodded, "C'mon, how long have you been alive?" 

"Honest," she repeated, "I'm twenty-seven. Born in 1973, on the reservation. Ask Gris, he'll vouch for me." 

"I just thought," he balked at saying it out loud. 

"What, that with all this wisdom?" She let it go at that, not finishing the thought. 

"Yeah," he agreed. He was surprised. Younger than him, then. That was a switch. 

"Disappointed?" She thought maybe he was, that he felt shown up by a youngster. 

"Not a bit," Nick answered. "Just surprised." He felt strengthened somehow at her youth, her preparedness. He began to think he might grow to like it in Texas. 

"Gris'll be glad to have us back," Cather offered. "He's been doing twice the work since Iain and I came to see you. This time of year, there'll be a lot more left to be done." She thought of fall at the ranch, the parties and winter evenings ahead, made somehow more appealing when added to the list of back-breaking chores like riding fence, breaking the last of the horses, birthing the last of the calves. "Nick," she asked, her mind on another track than his, "can you ride at all?" She had a suspicious feeling the mad wood cutter could not, never had. 

But Nick's mind was far from her own, and he did not answer. 

"Cather?" he asked, a few moments later. 

"Yeah?" 

"Just for future reference? I hate grits." 

Her laughter rang across the lake, and within that new part of himself, where he could sense others like him, he felt it there too, vibrating free, expansive, and alive. 

\--In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with Cather paddling, he felt quite sure that he would never die.-- 

_The End_

092899 

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**DISCLAIMERS**

CHARACTERS:: The following characters are owned by Panzer-Davis/Gaumont/Rysher: Nick Wolfe, Amanda, Duncan MacLeod, Pascal, Claudia Hoffman, Lauren Wolfe, Kronos.  
Nothing is intended by their appearance and use here, except to perhaps, on some small scale, resuscitate them from their too early demise.  
The other characters are part of my family.  
All members of Nick's family that I have created here are available for loan, if they've sparked anything creative in other fictioneers. The Longwoods and Caitlin are still under contract to me. :)  
**TIMELINE::** This occurs after both series finales of HLTS and HLTR, and after (in order) my stories: _If I Should Not Return_ and _The Bird's-Eye View_ (actually, the prologue here occurs in tandem with the epilogue there), although I would like to think that I have structured this so that a reader not familiar with my other work could enjoy it just as well.  
My story, _To Shop, Perchance to Scheme_ takes place in Paris *during* the action of this story. From about day Thirty-nine.  
Allow me to invite you to check out any of the above fiction. They are posted at The Raven's Nest and the OutBack Fiction Shack.  
For all practical purposes, this story occurs early fall of 1999.  
**FLASHBACKS::** The funeral, South Chicago, 1979 (hence Nick is 13). The previous flashback, to the boys' bedroom, probably takes place around 1976, but I had imagined it as a recurring thing, not necessarily a discreet episode.  
Cather's first meeting with Duncan MacLeod (recounted, not a true flashback) took place in 1997, after _Archangel_.  
**EPIGRAPH::** From _Shakespeare in Love_. It is Elizabeth I's response to the Earl of Wessex when he begs her to know how things will turn out.  
The epigraph to Part One is Ernest Hemingway describing his own wounding experience in World War I.  
**HEMINGWAY::** Here are some thoughts on Hemingway, from whose story _Indian Camp_ , the last two lines and title for the second section are taken.  
_Indian Camp,_ the short story, is about Nick Adams, an eight-year-old boy confronting both birth and death for the first time.  
Hemingway was interested in the randomness of fate, as well as a particular type of wound, which he described as, "a sudden cutting away of past experience and securities." He is concerned with the "mystery and impersonality of its source, and the anger fear and helplessness that are part of the reaction to it."  
This wound, to him, is unreasonable because, "the victim cannot understand why it has happened to him." It is "a violation," asaulting ones "sense of dignity and security as a result of a random, meaningless event." He should've met newly-immortal Nick Wolfe.  
A Hemingway man can be destroyed, but not defeated. In _Big Two-Hearted River_ the protagonist (also named Nick) immerses himself in ritual action (fishing there, chopping wood, etc. here) in order to keep from falling apart inside.  
Part three takes its title from Hemingway's own motto, that in the face of all this, "il faut durer." It is necessary to endure.  
**BETA::** Yakut, toujours Yakut.  
Who, in response to a questionnaire I sent her, responded to the following question thusly; "If you could change one thing about the story what would it be?"  
_Pa would come along and hew some logs to make a floor. And a clever little latching door. But only after Nick put away the china shepherdess._  
If you don't get that, well, you're just not reading enough Laura Ingalls Wilder, and someone probably stole your childhood away from you while you slept. :)  
**COMING ATTRACTIONS::** Well, it will probably be a while before the next segment in this saga, which I have tentatively titled the "Fare Thee Well" arc. I expect something to show up by Christmas, though. Can't have Nick and Amanda apart for the holidays. That piece carries a working title of _A Thief, A Nun, and a Conjurer Walk Into a Bar,_ and it's set in Las Vegas and East Texas.  
The next story you'll see posted by me is a Cat and Richie story, currently carrying the awkward title of _Kyrie eleison: While the sands of life shall run._ It's set in Chicago in 1997, and will most likely be my first PWP. I'm writing it for Wilusa, who gave me the idea.  
**AUTHOR'S NOTE::** We all know Nick is prone to nightmares. In _Full Disclosure_ , the _Raven's_ second episode, he tells his former Captain, "I'll trade you the heat for the nightmares," when they're discussing Claudia's death and the events surrounding it.  
I recognize that I have taken some extreme liberties with Nick's past and family life, but when I visited the Rysher site's bio for him, they seemed to think that his wife's name was Lisa Donovan, so why can't I make some equally unsubstantiated claims?  
As Yakut can tell you, some of the character names for this story, as well as the title, have been on the side of our refrigerator since the summer after _Archangel_. But I was always coming at it from the angle of its being Cather's story about finding Duncan dying out in the Texas brush. That story, of course, still exists, (stories being like matter, they can be neither created nor destroyed :) but as backstory. I was very pleased and happy to be able to re-write it with Nick Wolfe as the lead character, even if we both had to experience a nervous breakdown to do it.  
Nick's a good man, and I look forward to working with him again. 

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© 1999  
Please send comments to author! 

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